Jan Freeman, “Write it Right”

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett. Welcome to a special minicast.

Today we’re talking to Jan Freeman. She is a language columnist for the Boston Globe and author of the new book, Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right, the celebrated cynic’s language peeves deciphered, appraised, and annotated for 21st century readers. What a heck of a subtitle, Jan.

Yes, well, we need to have long subtitles these days to tell you exactly what the book is about, because it’s a little bit complicated in this case.

Who was Ambrose Bierce? Why do we care about his usage advice?

I’m not sure we care that much about his usage advice, except that he reflects his time 100 years ago in America. But a lot of people care a lot about Ambrose Bierce, who was quite a well-known journalist in his time.

He’s the author of The Devil’s Dictionary, which last I knew had a fan club on Facebook calling him the baddest-ass lexicographer who ever lived. And that book, as his fans know, is full of definitions like love, a temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Now, Bierce was also a young Civil War veteran. He wrote a lot of stories about the Civil War and some very Twilight Zone-ish stories, too, which people consider early science fiction or fantasy.

You’ve taken a book that he wrote, and you’ve added or kind of amended his data with modern opinions, or just basically pointed out he was wrong even at the time that he wrote.

Well, I was really trying to get a handle on what we thought about our language 100 years ago. And I’d been wondering about some of his rules for quite a while as I looked at this book, because he didn’t explain them often. He would simply say that gents was vulgar exceedingly and leave it at that.

And as this book was about to turn 100 years old, I thought, what an excellent way to learn about the history of usage by finding out why Ambrose Bierce thought the things he thought.

So his problem with gents was that it was just, he should say, someone should say gentleman instead?

Well, you should say gentleman, but only a few people understood the true meaning of gentleman.

And those people were gentlemen.

So it’s much more complicated.

You’ll have to turn to gentlemen to find out the whole story on that one.

How did he rate against the other language mavens of the day, or even for that matter, against language mavens today?

Was he respectable? Did people listen to his advice?

I would say he was respected, but not famous.

He was one of an enormous crowd of writers working this territory in the second half of the 19th century and into the early 20th.

And truly, everyone from archbishops and Sanskrit scholars to country newspaper editors was publishing a usage book.

There were dozens.

And, of course, each one copied from the last.

And you never knew.

And Beert very much represented the mainstream.

In some of his choices, he was a little out of date.

He beat a few horses that were soundly dead by then.

A lot of the grammar advice that he gives, or at least a fair amount of it, seems to suppose that we should all speak in formal language.

And that seems to be the common mistake of the language maven, to suppose that there is only one kind of language, and it’s the formal one.

Is this a reason just to dismiss him out of hand?

Well, it’s a reason. Nowadays I would say it might be a reason to dismiss almost anyone.

Because we’re finally, I think, beginning to grasp that English language is more than standard written English.

And that really people can learn to write one way and talk another way,

Enjoying the multitudinous wonders of the language.

But I would say this.

A hundred years ago, it looks to me as if a lot of the striving learners of English,

And that includes Bierce, who never finished high school,

A lot of them were also looking for speech advice.

They didn’t make that distinction the way I would today.

I noticed that I have a little collection of pamphlets from Funk and Wagnalls, the dictionary publishers,

From the early 20th century, and they’re called things like,

Mend your speech, faulty diction, better say, and they’re not pronunciation.

They are usage advice, but packaged for someone, the clerk who wants to sound like a manager, the housewife who wants to sound as if she’s a little better educated.

So I don’t think that distinction would have meant as much in that day. Americans wanted to improve their language overall, which is why there was such an enormous market for these books. And I think that there still is somewhat of a market for it.

Let me go to one of the entries. At the entry for consent for assent, Bierce advises that one never consents to an opinion, one assents it. I don’t think we would argue with that. But you comment in your notes on that entry that there’s no evidence that these words were ever much confused. Do you think that Bierce introducing a rule like that could sow the seeds of confusion where none really existed before? That is, by saying that there’s a problem when there isn’t one, he’s actually creating the problem?

In a case like that, where really what he calls a mistake was, I think, quite rare. Excuse me. I’m not sure that it makes a lot of difference. But I do think a lot of what these people did was multiplying the opportunity for mistakes by naming mistakes that had never been named that way before.

One in Beers is recollect versus remember. And he and several of the other usage mavens said that recollect should only mean remember with effort. So you distinguish between I don’t remember and I don’t recollect based on how much effort it took to remember. And I thought, wait, how would anyone know you were making that distinction? And how could it possibly be useful? And, you know, I doubt that that ever really was a distinction, except in the minds of some usages.

They were giving in to a normal human impulse to assign words distinct meanings if they had different forms. And we do that, of course, with hanged and hung, which we decided one is for pictures and the other one is for people, even though there’s no particular reason for that. And we do it with venomous and poisonous, where poisonous has always been the more general word, and venom is one kind of poison. But some usages think that you should only say venom for animals and only say poisonous for other poisons.

Now, in my book, the main thing this does is multiply the opportunities to go wrong, because one person makes a distinction in his usage book. The next person picks that up and makes a few more distinctions. And before you know it, you have hundreds of distinctions that no one was ever making before and that you’re now expecting people to observe. And really, a lot of them just collapsed under the weight of sheer multiplicity. No one could remember all those distinctions.

Right, right, right. I note here on the entry for expectorate that Bierce thought the word expectorate, meaning to spit, was offensive. What was his problem with expectorate?

Well, you notice I think he cites Latin in that case. And the problem is that expectorate does not mean spit. It means to lock something nasty up from your chest. You can hear pectoral there in expectorate. And so he and others considered it kind of vulgar as well as pretentious. And one of the interesting things I found was that Teddy Roosevelt also had an opinion on expectorate. When he was the police commissioner of New York City, he had asked the Board of Health specifically to replace spit in their public signage with, replace expectorate with the word spit. Because he said expectorate was a vile word, and no spitting is the proper way to say no spitting.

That’s curious, and I understand that there were a few of these terms where he thought that the Latin etymological root should hold sway, but that’s kind of the etymological fallacy. Is a mistake that a lot of grammar mavens make, that just kind of forgetting or choosing to forget that the old word, the old meaning doesn’t apply anymore or doesn’t have to apply anymore.

True, but a lot of the usage writers of this time had still been schooled in Latin. And though Bierce had not, he was self-taught. I think this was his way of showing that he had the right to legislate language along with these educated people.

You know, they would often, and even Fowler, you know, who didn’t publish his big usage book until 1926, would make these points quite often, that it was bad Latin to put together a word like electrocute, which is formed badly because it pretends that cute means kill, whereas cute is from a completely different Latin word and has nothing to do with killing.

So this was a common, it was bad Latin or badly formed, you know, were quite common for several decades after Bierce’s time and a way of showing that you’re an educated person.

In responding to him, it seems that you’ve done a great deal to find out more about him. In his era, do you find that you know him well now, that Ambrose Bierce is kind of alive in your mind?

He is in a way, and in a way it’s sad, because I knew him as a satirist and quite a biting wit. And the more you read him, I’m not a Bierce expert, so I don’t want people who really know Bierce to take offense, but it does seem that he didn’t have a very happy life, and that the people who called him bitter Bierce were perhaps on to something.

I would have hoped that someone who made jokes all the time would be having more fun with him, but it really does seem that he was not a very happy man.

Besides the Devil’s Dictionary, another thing that he’s known for is disappearing in Mexico in 1913. What do you think happened there?

It’s a great, great mystery. One of the biographers suggests that that was all a red herring and that, in fact, Bierce was getting old and not doing well. His reputation was fading, and that he took himself off to the Grand Canyon and shot himself, which is why his bones have never been found. And after reading quite a lot of Ambrose Bierce, that sounds plausible to me, but I’m afraid there’s just no evidence one way or the other.

Well, Jan, I want to thank you for spending some time with us today. Jan Freeman is a language columnist for the Boston Globe. She’s written a book called Ambrose Bierce’s Write it Right, the celebrated cynic’s language peeves, deciphered, appraised, and annotated for 21st century readers.

Jan, thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you, Grant. It was a pleasure.

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